XPS 8700 Blue Screen, Boot Device Error

Computer: Dell XPS 8700 OS: Win 7 Pro Has an archive USB3 hard drive attached to it Basically less than a week old.

While browing tonight, I got a blue screen. could not save anything as it does not stay on the screen long enough to take a pic. After the system rebooted, I was greeted with:

Reboot and Select proper Boot Device - or Insert boot media in selected Boot device and press a key. As if there was no boot disk in the computer. There was nothing in the DVD drive.

Hitting a key, same thing.

Inserted the Win7 basic recover CD that I made when I got the computer and booted off of that, and it showed me a screen like:

Basically it is telling me it doesn't see a hard drive at all.

Removed the CD, and powered off the computer. A bit later, powered it back on, and it booted to the safe mode selection screen and when told to just boot, rebooted just fine.

This is disconcerting... This computer needs to be rock solid as I travel a lot and use it as a base. I'm not concerned about the contents as it is backed up nightly and can be restored, but having the blue screen on basically a brand new computer without much loaded on it is not good.

Note that the environment the computer is in is ideal, good temps, clean and conditioned power in a secure room, behind a firewall etc... and only I touch it.

At this point I thought perhaps the hard drive was flaky, but looking at the stats from CrystalDiskInfo, it looks okay:

The event viewer didn't show much other than it rebooted from an kernel error.